Little Rich Girl
by bumbles bees
Summary: Newbies fic: Accepting her limits is not something that's ever come easily to Jane. Jane, Roderick, friendship with a hint of romance if you're looking for it.


Jane comes from money. That's no secret.

Say what you will about Dalton and its discriminatory policies and its atmosphere of toxic testosterone (and Jane does), she never got made fun of for it there. Because, well, everyone came from money. Here, she gets called Princess and Daddy's Little Rich Girl and a lot of other things that don't even make _sense_. Jane's been here two weeks. Part of her is beginning to understand why the twins hide behind infallible positivity and Roderick hides behind headphones. But the rest of her is just pissed off. She wants to yell at them, 'I stand for social justice! I care about inequality! I'm not some precious doll in an ivory tower!' but how _can_ she when her daddy started an entire lawsuit just to get her into a glee club?

She feels like a hypocrite and she hates it.

The first time she and Mason make plans for the New New Directions to do dinner and a movie, Roderick sadly and politely declines. He's got work that evening. Jane can tell he'd like to go more than just about anything. But it doesn't quite hit her how sad for him she should be until halfway through the bus ride there, when she and the twins are chattering endlessly and enthusiastically about musical theatre and suddenly she realizes that she's barely noticed his absence. If Roderick were there, he'd listen far more than he spoke. Still getting used to the whole 'having friends' thing.

So when he turns up at the '50s-inspired diner halfway through dinner, out of breath and beaming, and announces proudly that he asked his boss at the stables and got the night off, she gets up out of her seat and hugs him.

Roderick hugs are the best hugs. Jane wonders if he'd be embarrassed if she asked to use him as a pillow during the movie. But embarrassment seems to be far from Roderick that night – he's animated and quick to laugh. He teases the twins, the twins tease him, Jane teases everyone present. The conversation flows thick. They break into song often. At one point the middle-aged lady at the next table asks if they're a band, and they end up singing her a four-part arrangement of 'Unforgettable' that's mostly improvised. People applaud.

Jane insists on treating. They try to fight her for it, especially the twins, who come from Irish stock and have, as they put it, 'an overdeveloped sense of shame. About some things.' But that only makes her more resolved.

"Look," she admits, "here's the thing. My family's very well-off."

"We know," says Madison, "We've seen your shoes."

"Your skirt costs $400 at most retailers," chimes in Mason.

Roderick is bemused. "You can tell that by looking?"

"The brand, honey, the brand."

"I'm so lost."

"Remind me to take you shopping."

"Nobody needs to see the painful process that is me trying on clothes."

"Au contraire," say Jane and Madison, in unison, just to see Roderick flush pink and grin into his sundae.

Jane takes a moment to appreciate his dimples and then gets herself back on track. "The point – the _point_, Mason, knock it off – is that I've had too many friends who only approved of me because of my money. As it turned out."

Mason stops making faces at his sister and stares at her. "But that's terrible."

Jane shrugs. Yes, it's terrible. At the time it hurt like a white-hot poker, so much that she lied to herself about it all through middle school. Jess, Miranda, Tasha… lord, she missed them sometimes. But with them it was always this designer and that designer. No interiority. No discussion of anything _real_. And then when Jane started doing her social justice work and making noise about privilege and discrimination – when her tastes began to show that she was not merely African-American but Black, angry and proud – they scuttled away as fast as their fake-ass spray-tanned legs would take them.

And then she looked at herself in the mirror and wondered if it was her fire that had driven them away. She still wonders. She knows she's intense. Was it their fault? Was a fifteen-year-old Joan of Arc with a giant poster of Malcolm X on her wall just too much for three sheltered teenagers to handle?

"You guys are so different," says Jane, with a shy smile. "We're eating in a _diner_. I've never even _been_ to a diner." She holds up her empty milkshake glass with a giggle. "I think I like malted more than champagne."

"That's like trying to compare Chopin and the BeeGees," points out Roderick.

"Team Champagne and Chopin!" cry the twins in unison. Mason sips his soda with his pinky out and Madison sticks a quarter in her eye like it's a monocle, strokes an invisible moustache and spends the next ten minutes pretending to be a wealthy English aristocrat named Lord Pompy-Mimsy. Pretty soon they're all competing for the title of upper-class twit of the year.

During the movie, Jane starts to yawn spontaneously. She's not used to staying up this late. Roderick lifts the seat rest between them and pats his shoulder. She lets her head droop against his chubby upper arm.

* * *

When she wakes up, Roderick's carrying her bridal-style out of the theatre while the twins giggle about it in hushed voices.

"Good morning, Janey sunshine," says Mason, seeing her eyes open.

"How did you wake so soon?" adds Madison.

"You drive away the little stars-"

"-You drive away the moon."

"You went out like a light," says Roderick, half-apologetically. He's carrying her like she weighs nothing at all. "We didn't want to wake you."

Jane debates telling him to put her down, but… nah.

* * *

The next day at lunch she mentions to them that she's thinking about getting a job.

The twins pause their game of let's-tickle-each-other-with-kale-leaves-and-see-who-laughs-first. "Why? You don't exactly need the money."

Jane draws herself up, tilts her jaw. She looks regal. "It's not about the money. It's about self-sufficiency."

That's what she told her parents, too. Because she's tired of feeling the truth of insults like 'Daddy's Little Rich Girl'. She doesn't want to live in an ivory tower. She's lucky to have what she has – she's not going to take it for granted – but she grew up on her grandmother's stories of a time when you worked two jobs to earn a living, half the time washing the white folks' laundry or raising their kids. When all you could hope to provide for your own kids was a hot meal, let alone a good school. She refuses to let that fade from her mind.

"I could ask at the stables," says Roderick.

Jane hesitates. "I can't make you do that, you just asked them a favor the other night to spend time with us-"

"Jane, I've known Mr. McCrery since I was three."

"…Oh." She thinks about it, and pretty soon she's beaming. Working with friends. It sounds great. "…Could you?"

* * *

"Um…"

Roderick meets her at the gates of the stable for her first day. He's looking her up and down and Jane can already tell she's made a mistake.

He's dressed as he usually is – jeans and a loud, Western-inspired button-up, rolled to the elbows. There's mud on the cuffs of his jeans and dirt in his fingernails. And Jane's in a tailored pantsuit and one-inch heels.

She sets her jaw and decides to own it. "Let's do this."

Her heels sink into the mud as he takes her past feeding pens and water troughs and into the stable itself. There's chickens everywhere. And probably chicken crap everywhere, she realizes, trying not to make a face. Then she realizes there's going to be horse crap everywhere too, and resolves to burn this suit. For now, she's not going to be squeamish. She's not a princess.

It's dark inside. It smells of manure and earth and hay and animals. As her eyes adjust she makes out the shapes of horses, many many horses – huge ones with hoofs like dinner plates, delicate light-framed things with their manes in bows, fat little ponies. A donkey's bray sounds out behind her.

"We have forty-seven horses stabled right now," Roderick's telling her, taking a brush off a hook on the wall. "We groom them, feed them and take them out to pasture. Each breed and each individual horse needs a little different handling, so it's important to get to know them."

He leads her up to a dark brown horse with a white diamond on its forehead. It sticks its neck out of the pen and bobs its head, butting its nose into Roderick's hand. He strokes its muzzle lovingly, whispering, "Good girl. There's a good girl."

Jane hangs back, wide-eyed. When she was little her parents gave her the choice between ballet and riding lessons. Jane chose ballet. She's never been so close to a horse. It's far from the biggest horse here, but she can't help but be struck by how _huge_ it is. Its head is the size of her torso. Its massive, liquid brown eyes stare at her and it makes an anxious snorting sound.

"It's best not to stare at her," says Roderick, gently, stroking the horse's muzzle. It calms immediately. "They're just like people – they don't like being stared at. This is Musket. She's a Dutch Warm Blood. Four years old and very gentle."

She looks at him for reassurance and is struck by how well he seems to fit here. Next to these massive animals, Roderick doesn't look large or ungainly. Just solid. He's slow and calm and gentle. His voice is soft.

Jane tries to emulate that calm, and takes a confident step forward, offering out her hand.

Musket shies away, making another little anxious snort. She paces in her pen. Her ears twitch.

Roderick strokes the horse's muzzle again and whispers to it. "Shh. It's okay."

Jane tries again. This time the horse whinnies. She sees the whites of its eyes.

"Shhh…" He starts to sing, a gentle melody in a textured _pianissimo_. "_Here's a hymn to welcome in the day / Heralding a summer's early sway / And all the branches burst abloom__…_"

Jane doesn't know the words. He turns to her with reassuring eyes as the horse stills again. "Try singing something?"

Jane sings a few bars of the first jazz standard that enters her head, as gently and smoothly as she can. "_Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky / Stormy weather / Since my man and I ain't together…_"

She knows she sounds amazing, her voice clear and true, and she's ready for it to work magic like it did for him. But Musket backs away, tossing her head, snuffing and pacing. The horses anxiousness is palpable.

Jane's hurt. She stiffens. And then the horse lets out a high whinny and starts to try to budge out of her pen. Around her, other horses are picking up on Musket's anxiety. Restless sounds echo around the stable.

Roderick swallows and gives her a look that's full of apology. "You'd better back away."

"But-"

A few pens away, a horse rears high, kicking its massive hooves. Roderick leaves Musket and approaches it, cautious but without fear.

Its front hoof misses his head by what feels like an inch. Jane startles, feeling her heartbeat in her mouth. She wants to help him – she's grown used to subtly watching over him, protecting him – but this time there's nothing she can do that wouldn't endanger him even more. She backs out of the stable door, panting, shaking.

A few minutes later Roderick emerges into the sunlight, miraculously alive – though his hair is askew and he's a touch breathless. "Sorry about that. That was King. Hot blood stallion. He's a racing horse. Aggressive. I'm sort of the only one who can go near him."

"_You're_ sorry? He nearly killed you."

"Not his fault. He was just scared."

"No – I mean it's me who should be sorry – I don't know what I'm doing wrong. How did you get so good with them?"

Roderick shrugs. "I spend all day avoiding the rage of testosterone-fuelled beasts, I have some practice." His half-guilty grin lets her know it's a joke, though she doesn't find it particularly funny at the moment. "Seriously, though – my mom's a horse vet. In Chicago she worked for the racetracks. I've been around horses my whole life… I think I like them better than people."

"Why did you move?" asks Jane. She's wondered that for a while now.

"Mom had issues with the races. When a horse loses… more often than not it winds up getting turned into glue." The thought clearly pains him.

Jane recoils. Her hands ball into fists.

"She tried to fight them on it. Lost her job. They started smearing her in the papers to silence her – making up lies – it was awful. For both of us." His shoulders sag. "And we didn't get anywhere on it. So a friend of the family offered her a job, and… here we are. It's not perfect, but at least they treat the horses humanely here."

There's so much hurt in his voice when he talks about what was done to his mother that Jane begins to understand why Roderick's not a fighter. She knows she would have done what his mother did. She _hopes_ she would have known when to accept defeat, for the sake of her family.

She tries again and again, but the horses get antsy the moment she walks into the room. She doesn't want Roderick to keep putting himself in danger to calm the hot bloods. She sits on a bale of hay outside the stable doors, feeling useless.

_Does_ she know when to accept defeat?

She's always had a way of putting people on edge. She challenges things. She makes waves. She can't help it – it's just how she's always been. She can no more calm her wide, staring eyes than she can tame her halo of curls, and why should she want to? As a child she would ask loud and awkward questions at her parents' dinner parties and get a laugh with a hint of nervousness in it. As a teenager she branded herself blunt, a truth-teller, and made enemies as often as she made friends. Maybe this is why Jess, Miranda and Tasha drifted away from her so suddenly…

She won't apologize for being what she is. Doing so would be dishonest and toxic. But she has to recognize that she has limits.

Not something that comes easily to her. She's blasted through so many limits in past. She feels like she _ought_ to be able to do anything she sets her mind to. Painful logic tells her that's just not true.

Roderick comes out of the stables again, biting his lip. He plainly has no idea what to say to her about this massive failed experiment.

Jane takes matters into her own hands. She stands and approaches him. "I'm sorry, Roderick… you stuck your neck out for me… but I can't do this. I'm not cut out for it."

He looks relieved. "…Some people are and some people aren't. Don't feel bad."

She goes straight up to the main offices to quit like an honorable person before the boss has to fire her. Mr. McCreary is a wizened old thing with a brusque manner and very blue eyes.

"I'm so sorry, sir."

"To be honest I'm glad you had the sense. I hate firing people. Only hired you for Ricky's sake." He shakes his head. "Good kid, but _lord_, he's so awkward… Ain't never seen him with friends his own age."

Jane bites her lip.

"Be nice to him, huh?"

"Roderick's very dear to me, sir."

"Dear how?"

"…He's a friend. We're in glee club together."

Mr. McCreary obviously has no idea what glee club is. He looks at her steadily. "You break his heart and I'll set every thoroughbred in the stable on you."

Jane blushes deeply. "I won't, sir."

She hopes she can keep that promise. She's not sure what it would mean yet. She's not at all sure what she feels.

Mr. McCreary smiles. "Tell you what. Tell him he's got the rest of the day off. You two go and do something together. Take the sting out of you havin' to fire yourself."

* * *

They end up riding. Jane's on an ancient dappled mare named Apple, the calmest in the whole place and the only one that seems remotely willing to let her get on it. Roderick's on a massive, jet-black Irish Draft named Tommy, who he assures her isn't deaf, dumb or blind, and can't play pinball at all.

Jane doesn't get the joke, but he doesn't mind explaining it. They meander over the farm.

"I'm sorry it didn't work out," says Roderick.

Jane sighs, chews her lip. "Maybe I was kidding myself with this whole part-time job thing. Having a job isn't going to make me any less privileged – shoveling horse crap doesn't make up for everything I have that other people don't."

"I think it's really admirable that you want to see it from the other end of the spectrum," says Roderick. "I wouldn't give up yet. You just need to find something that suits you."

There's a special kind of irony in Roderick, of all people, telling _her_ not to give up. She smiles. "You think?"

"Of course. You're smart, you're charismatic, you're confident, you're…" He's starting to go pink.

Jane feels a little flutter in her stomach. Then she remembers what Mr. McCreary said, and looks down at Apple's mane with a sudden interest. "I hope so."

"Do you drink coffee?"

"Does the pope go to mass?"

"You'd be a great barista."

She giggles at the thought.

"No, seriously! Belting out people's orders in Starbucks lingo, _one grande half-caf nonfat hazelnut latte no whip_ and all that - charming all the customers, drawing hearts in the latte foam- it's so you!"

"I do know my coffee," she admits.

"See?"

"Could I rock a green apron?"

"Does a bear shit in the woods?"

Jane beams to herself, already picturing it.

* * *

A week later Roderick walks into a Starbucks. Behind the counter, Jane winks at him. "Grande half-caf nonfat hazelnut latte?"

"Make it full fat," says Roderick, with something between a laugh and a sigh. "I already hate myself this week, I may as well commit to it."

"Whipped cream?"

"Does the pope shit in the woods?"

Jane gives him extra, and sprinkles on top.


End file.
